Comment by llm_trw
5 days ago
Hate is too weak a term for what I feel for Adobe.
Adobe kept PDF as a proprietary format from 1992 to 2008. You got the reader for free ... on windows, with a single executable. You didn't get an editor and had to pay through the nose for one from Adobe.
It wasn't until the late 2010s that it actually became a free-ish standard, if you think that a 3,500 page document is a 'standard'.
The only reason why adobe did it is because djvu was eating their lunch, between 2002 and 2008 it was the defacto standard for scanned documents in academia. The documents were easy to edit. The image compression is still better than the native compression on PDF.
To add insult to injury after displacing postscript on windows in the name of security, not only did they add a scripting language to PDF, they added one written in two weeks at a time when it was so bad no one used it for anything but pop-ups and with more security vulnerabilities than you could shake a stick at. I suppose we should be happy Adobe didn't put flash in. Oh wait, they did: https://www.reddit.com/r/Adobe/comments/yqisho/flash_content...
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